Resolving the Quadratic Assignment Problem with the Elephant Herding Optimization

Combinatorial problems are often challenging and require creative thinking to find optimal solutions. These problems involve analysing and manipulating discrete objects or structures, such as permutations, combinations, graphs, or networks. In this paper, we present an application of the Elephant herding optimization (EHO) for solving the Quadratic assignment problem (QAP), which is one of the most popular combinatorial problems. The elephant herding optimization is a metaheuristic algorithm inspired by the herding behaviour of elephants in the wild. It simulates the collaboration and communication among elephants to find optimal solutions to continued optimization problems. To apply the Elephant herding optimization (EHO) to the QAP, we propose some adaptations to the EHO algorithm. The experiments are performed on a set of 25 benchmark QAPLIB instances.